Ah, the heady days of RISC OS when all the libraries and utilities had a single official version for each OS release and every app had to play with it. Compact, consistent and fast. But not exactly agile.

Rogue apps mushroomed, trying to deliver topical features ahead of the game - well, ahead of Acorn's game anyway. To keep their niche markets the app developers had no choice. How Acorn tantrumed at such disrespect! How the users promptly left in droves, taking the app developers with them....

Heady days. Dependency hell is the price of remaining competitive.

"Klinger, do you know how many zoots were killed to make that one suit?" — BJ Hunnicutt, 4077 M*A*S*H

Dependency handling is much better these days, on my systems is 99.9% automatically handled compared to the "olden" days of doing it yourself.

Having said that, there is still one install that suffers from dependency hell and having to trawl the internet to find out where certain files are in what libraries - installing Skype on a 64 bit machine. It requires a tonne of (32Bit) dependencies. Worse is, it might need a few KB from a file in a library, but the entire library is say 5MB.

ghex2 is installed by default but dos2unix isn't. Even if that's true, it takes seconds to install and a tool like that, or sed, doesn't require you to make individual changes to each file, it can batch the whole lot with one command.

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." (Albert Einstein)